Month: March 2009

Saturday we ventured over to B.’s sister’s to celebrate her brother’s birthday. It was good times. B.’s brother in law is a bit of a techno geek like myself. He had the house wirelessly setup for music. It was very cool! Basically with a remote that functions very much like an ipod you can listen to Internet radio and play music from any shared network drives. He had three remotes so there was a song battle to add songs to the queue. That seemed to provide hours or entertainment. Not that song! *Delete from queue* You deleted my song! Why… listen to THIS then… and so it went. Her cousin Allison and her BF Jay were also over. They ended up coming over to our place after dinner; as did her brother. We were all thinking of heading out to a local pub but everyone was pretty zonked so we had a few more beer and talked. I think Jay and Steve stayed up to watched F-1 racing after I went to bed.

Sunday we did a fair bit of running around after everyone left. We hit Zehr’s, Home Depot, Sportchek then got home to walk the dog. In the evening we watched Rachel Getting Married. I was expecting a girly crapstory but it was far from that. Sure there was a wedding but it wasn’t really the focus of the film. The film was more about people, conflict, relationships, death, loss, addiction… it was pretty heavy. The movie was well acted and full of curious cultural elements that were showcased throughout the wedding. I’m not really certain which cultures were celebrated here, but they certainly knew how to party!

The gutters on our roof are the originals on the house. They have been around for >30 years and are really beginning to show it. There are major holes in them and the leafs in the fall make a disaster of them as they pile up and aren’t flushed out by rain etc.. So we decided to look into getting them replaced and got our first quote this week. Do you have any idea how much it would cost to replace a houses’ gutters? Well we didn’t. I figured a few thousand, maybe 5k. Well it was more than DOUBLE my guess. Sweet Jesus! So… I think we’ll look into other options… it needs to get done but that is a lot of money.

It will be a busy weekend. We are are B.’s sister’s Saturday to celebrate her brother’s birthday. Some of B.’s cousins are coming over afterwards and are staying the night. it should be fun.

Still playing with the background on unsung… Not sure what I’ll settle on. At some point images will return to the header as well.

The Cast
And it finally ends. So say we all. I watched this series since it began. It started off being very engaging, lagged a bit but compared to most of what is on TV it was always heads and tails above most of what was on. I’m sad to see it end. Random thoughts as I watch the last episode:

-OMG they have a cylon on the main deck controlling the ship… was this all an elaborate con job?

-all the Adamas are going to die

-Baltar stayed behind. Huh!

-Baltar with a gun! lol

-‘Galatica has seen a lot of battles. This will be her last.’ *sniff!*

-Action stations! Start the clock!

-Battle scene was impressive…

-Awesome seeing the ground troops supported by Centrions

-‘in the end it is all about mathematics….’ Doh.

-‘tell the old man I owed him one…’

-‘how do you know God is on your side Doctor?’

-‘you have to take a Leap of Faith’

-‘Everyone, stand down….’

-‘I don’t mean to rush you! But you are keeping two civilizations waiting!’

-Ha! Just when you thought it would end nice nice…the sins of the past come to light.

Heading into Nemo side trail North of Oakville.
We ended up meeting up with Marnie and Brian today for a dog walk. Marnie had a great location North of Oakville just up Guelph Line, Mount Nemo. It is part of the Bruce Trail. It was a nice walk up Mount Nemo with a beautiful vista overlooking the Niagara Escarpment. We are so lucky to live in this area. The Niagara Escarpment has created awesome places to hike.

Brian made a delicious Curry Carrot soup. I was very impressed. It was a day with B & M.

I had an interview in Mississauga Friday, it went well. As usual I’ll wait and see. They had pretty high expectations and seemed to be looking for a catch-all position, I’m not sure how interested in that I would be. No talk of salary range either. It was good to have a interview and ‘get out there’ regardless how it goes. Thanks to B. for starving herself the night before to go clothes shopping with me. We ended up at Mexx. I’ve never really shopped there, but I actually didn’t mind some of their clothes.

The Sabres continue to fumble along making any hopes of playoffs this year vanish. They looked better against the Rangers but still found a way to lose. Pretty brutal. They aren’t a playoff team. I hope there is a MAJOR overhaul of the team in the offseason. By major I’m hoping a new coach, new GM and get rid of as many of the passionless overpaid ballerinas on the team as they can. The team lacks heart and intensity. How can you lose 4 games in a row when you are trying to make the playoffs? Embarrassing. SiGH. Another failed season as a Sabres fan.

We had my sister and JP over today. JP and I assembled the natural gas BBQ… I can’t wait to try it out! We ended up going to see the movie The Watchmen. I’m not sure what I was expecting… I know the movie is based on comic books or a novel or some such thing. I found the movie to be entertaining but also odd and conflicted. There was waaaaay too much packed into it and too many sub-plots and stuff going on… I would have preferred a tighter screenplay with a more straightforward story. It was interesting for sure. The effects were often stunning. The film was often quite brutal and erotic, but also had a strong didactic nature that seemed to get mired at times. Thumbs up for Malin Akerman as a brunette as well. 🙂 All that said, I’m still really torn to say I liked it. Also blue glowing dude’s penis got to be a little much too have to see.

I have an interview on Friday for a web dev position. It is with a cool company hopefully it will go well. I love my pets but being with them all day (and it seems all the time) is driving me a little nuts. There are a lot more web positions than anything to do with video game development. As much as I’d like to return to game development, I’m not sure it will happen.

Weather is finally improving. Had the aforementioned animals in the backyard this week to enjoy the warmth. As the seasons change so does the neighbourhood…. A new family moved in a few doors down and yesterday our neighbour put up a for sale sign. So we’ll have new neighbours sooner or later…

Watched this very touching short film on youtube. Do watch it, it is very good.

Do I really need to go on about how disappointed I’m in the Sabres play lately? Embarrassing, heartless, scared play. I finally believe a coaching change is necessary, too hard to trade away half the team of under achievers.

I’ve been trying to code an RSS feed for my blog for several weeks… while xml is easy… the syntax required to display it isn’t always as easy. For anyone trying to code a PHP RSS feed from their MySQL database be sure to htmlentities your data, also important is the header to be set to (‘Content-type: text/xml’)… It should be working. You can find it at the bottom of the page or click here!

Tanga-langa! Happy it is warmer…
B. was busy most of the weekend with a project for work. We had planned on going to see Watchmen, but it became to late and there was no point rushing to make the movie. Strangely it plays at only twice in Bolton? We ended up having a relaxing night at home instead. Sunday afternoon we tried a new area of hiking on the Oak Ridges Trail. I picked a section fairly close to home. Regrettably it was flat as a pancake and pretty uninteresting. I don’t think the entire trail is like that but the section near Mount Pleasant was. I think it would be better to bike that section than walk it. So… we went to the old faithful walk in Albion Hills. Tanga ran all over and even flushed a bird then searched for it for another 30m. In the evening we got groceries and B. made a yummy pizza. It must be good there is only one small piece left.

I added a few more photos to flickr. You can check them out at the flickr link at the top of the page.

My Sabres are continuing to struggle… dropping a head slapping embarrassment of a game to the Thrashers in a shootout 4-3 after being ahead AT HOME 3-1 in the third. How can you possibly say this team doesn’t need a shake up?

Sleeping. Finally.
Anytime I think of guests and visitors coming over my mind plays the theme loop from Impossible Mission C64…(regrettably the quality is pretty low…) Guests you say? Yes. Gray ones. We are watching my sister’s horses dogs Sunday evening through to Wednesday evening. She is ‘racing’ in beautiful South Carolina where I was told it is 28 degrees. Sounds rough. My BiL is away on business. Three dogs is a lot more one than one. Especially three sporting dogs… Granted they have been reasonably well behaved but I’m different to them, and they are different to me. It certainly doesn’t help that my bitch dog growls at them anytime they come near her. Sigh. This is also the worst time of the year to own a dog. The muddy wet weather creates a lot more work as dogs go in and out of the house.

UPDATE! Apparently my BiL’s business ended early and he is picking the dogs up tonight. It is interesting to note how differently they behave when my sister isn’t around. 😛